LYS Podcast Episode 2
Summary This week’s podcast recounts conversations between Amanda and Colin and between Amanda and Mitch regarding specific people, most important among them Millicent Harper, Ettore Majorana and Waylon Taylor. Amanda and Mitch also go on a hunt chasing down a set of GPS coordinates given to them anonymously. First, Mitch presents information to Amanda about Millicent Harper, one of the people present at the first Leap Year Society meeting in 1888. Briefly, Millicent was very interested in topics such as alchemy, cuneiform, immortality and possibly even witchcraft, and used her husband Carson’s society – he was a member of a society called the Grand Orange Lodge – for her own research and investigation. This increasingly worried her husband – that is, until she killed him (even though he was trying to kill her first). She was later acquitted of the crime. Next, Colin relays what he’s found about two physicists, Weylen Taylor and Ettore Majorana. Majorana was a well-respected physicist who had started to expand his research into more obscure subjects, possibly involving human experimentation dedicated to learning how to measure a soul. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Professor Weylen Taylor was something of a disciple of Majorana’s with the two men researching similar topics. Taylor also disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There are rumors however that, before his disappearance, Taylor had begun experimenting with specific devices given to him by none other than Millicent Harper herself. Amanda then discusses a separate meeting with Mitch, where Mitch receives a set of GPS coordinates in response to a line of questioning on a deep web forum regarding The Leap Year Society. Amanda and Mitch go to the location indicated by the coordinates and find a poster with the LYS insignia and a series of numbers printed along the bottom. Lastly, Colin tells Amanda about a picture of Majorana that he received anonymously. This picture is similar to one published by the RIS, an Italian investigation agency, showing Majorana in Argentina in 1955. The difference is that, in Colin’s picture, Majorana is sitting on a bench with a suitcase – a suitcase with the same LYS symbol from the poster stamped clearly on the front. Transcript of LYS Podcast: Episode 2 -intro music- AMANDA MORRISON: Last episode, we looked into the world of secret societies, their historical significance, contemporary influence, and what the term ‘secret society’ actually means to us as a culture in 2018. By the end of that last episode, we’d focused our attention on two things: the possibility that a contemporary version of one of these secret societies had somehow been responsible for forcing an earlier version of this podcast off the air – so to speak – and a secret meeting between members of well-known secret societies that allegedly took place in Lincoln, England on February 29, 1888. You’re listening to the Leap Year Society. I’m Amanda Morrison. Stay with us. -music- AM: So, before we can ask the larger question about that meeting in February of 1888 and whether or not the group that met that day would eventually become known as the Leap Year Society, we need to ask a series of smaller questions. For example, what evidence do we have that this meeting in February of 1888 actually took place? MICHELLE SORRENSON: Millicent. Harper. AM: I’ll bite. Who’s Millicent Harper? MS: She’s the first name listed in the Athenaeum Press article. AM: I thought we’d lost that link. MS: The deep web site is gone but…I took a screen capture. AM: Smart! MS: Thanks. AM: What about Millicent Harper? MS: She was the wife of Carson Harper. AM: And Carson Harper was? MS: A-allegedly, Carson Harper was a member of a Northern Irish secret society known as the Grand Orange Lodge. It’s a Protestant group concerned with a united Britain and opposed to Irish or Scottish independence. AM: An Orangeman. MS: Exactly. But something happened to this particular Orangeman near the end of the 19th century. Something that resulted in him shifting his focus from politics and religion to something else. AM: To what? MS: Cuneiform. AM: Ok, please explain. MS: Of course. It was one cuneiform tablet in particular, something allegedly discovered on Easter Island. AM: Sumerian. MS: Yes. This particular tablet was written by the ruler of the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Kish, a woman named Kubaba. AM: Interesting. MS: She was SUPER interesting, a tavern-keeper who took the throne sometime around 2500 BCE. The only female monarch listed on the List of Kings, a clay tablet also written in cuneiform compiling the ancient rulers of Sumer and the length of their respective reigns. AM: And, what does this have to do with our secret society? MS: Carson Harper had started working with the Orangemen on a top-secret project, something that his wife Millicent had initiated. AM: What top secret project? MS: Magic. They believed that, via this cuneiform tablet from Easter Island, that they’d uncovered proof of immortality. They began digging deeper trying to find proof. AM: And did they find any proof? MS: Well, a number of clues followed their translation of the tablet that Millicent had led them to, and they began to believe that something…supernatural…might have been happening in Mesopotamia. They found lists and descriptions of a number of people suspected of being…gods. AM: Gods? MS: Immortals. AM: And what does this have to do with Carson Harper? MS: Well, it all comes back to his wife, Millicent. Eyewitnesses and physical evidence indicated that she’d murdered her husband. AM: Wow. MS: Yeah. Witnesses to this evidence, which took place in a public house in Essex, say that he claimed his wife was a witch and that he tried to stab her before she somehow managed to turn the knife on him. AM: So…what happened to her? MS: She was acquitted. And, as you already know, she would eventually end up at that meeting in Lincoln, England in 1888. But, this is where things get quite interesting. (sound of Michelle sliding a letter across the table) AM: What is this? MS: A letter. AM: From Carson Harper to Professor Bellamy Neville, an expert in Sumerian and Assyrian mythology? MS: Judging by their correspondence, they were lifelong good friends. AM: How many of these do you have? MS: Four. But this one is the most telling. AM: Wow. MS: Yeah. (voiceover) AM: Mitch was right. That letter was extremely interesting. I’m going to read a section of it for you now. It’s dated January 11, 1888. AM: “Bellamy, I’m at my wits’ end. What I warned you about during our last meeting has come to pass. Millicent has become more and more focused on ancient alchemy and has indeed been marshaling the resources of our order to her own, dare I say, twisted ends. I do not use that term twisted lightly. I believe she’s become convinced that there are others – magical beings of some kind who live among us. She’s uncovered evidence of these gods. Links and connections. My God Bellamy, she is convinced that Kubaba, the ruler of the ancient Sumerian city-state of Kish, married a fisherman in Liverpool in 1852. She’s been taking secret meetings, and I know she’s planning something. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s happening in Lincoln in February of this year. I suspect she’s practicing witchcraft along with the alchemy. I’m going to confront her. I’ll keep you informed. Good luck, and long life. Your friend, Carson Harper.” AM: So, what does this letter tell us? Well, it’s certainly an interesting historical perspective on a marriage, but it also does something else. It provides supporting evidence that a meeting took place in February 1888 in Lincoln, England. -music- AM: Speaking of meetings that took place a long time ago, I’m going to take a bit of a trip down memory lane of my own. Back to college. A friend of mine from school was obsessed with conspiracies and secret societies. His name is Colin Orry. Colin has worked for a number of different companies on a contract basis: film and entertainment companies, as well as insurance adjustors as an investigator. If you need deep background information on an actor or someone who may have faked an injury in the past, Colin is your guy. He’s the fact checker’s fact checker. He used to work as a cleaner, manipulating the internet to clean somebody’s identity. If you wanted something washed off Google search results, you called Colin. He quit after about a year. He told me that he just couldn’t handle how horrific people could be to each other. These days, Colin works from home in Montreal. Along with his day job as a digital investigator, Colin also runs a YouTube channel called “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Investigations and Explorations of the Bizarre”. He does top ten lists like “The Top Ten Haunted Taverns in Scotland”, “The Top Five Weirdest Sounds in the World”, and “The Top Nine Poltergeists in North America”. I reached out to Colin because of one of the videos he released last year, “The Top Five Secret Societies You’ve Never Heard Of”. His list didn’t include the Leap Year Society, so I called him up to ask him why. -phone rings- COLIN ORRY: He-llo. AM: Hey, Colin. It’s Amanda. Morrison. CO: Hey…it’s been more than a minute. -voiceover- AM: I gave Colin a day or two to look into the Leap Year Society and then called him back. -back to phone call- CO: How are things? AM: Things are good. I’m just working on this podcast at the moment, seeing where it takes me. CO: It seems to be taking you into pretty interesting territory. AM: I agree. CO: So, I looked into this Leap Year Society. AM: And? CO: And there’s not really much out there. AM: I know. It’s strange. CO: I took a look for the deep web site you mentioned. AM: And there was nothing there? CO: That’s right. I have a friend who’s working on a Wayback Machine for the dark net, but he’s having some funding issues. AM: I’ll bet. CO: But, I was able to find one potentially interesting connection to the Leap Year Society. AM: What do you have for me? CO: Waylon Taylor. AM: I’m sorry, but I don’t l know who that is. CO: Waylon Taylor was a research scientist who was living and working in the Bay Area at Berkeley University. AM: And how is that related to the Leap Year Society? CO: Well, I’ll get there. But first, a bit of background on Professor Taylor. AM: Ok. CO: K. Professor Waylon Taylor’s research was mainly concerned with sleep and states of consciousness, but he was also deeply involved in theoretical physics. AM: Sounds like a complicated guy. CO: Ha…it gets a LOT more complicated. Have you heard of a man named Ettore Majorana? AM: I…have not. CO: Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. He also disappeared under very suspicious circumstances. Did I mention that Professor Waylon Taylor is missing? AM: What happened to Taylor? CO: Uh ok, let me finish with Majorana first. Enrico Fermi, writing about Majorana in Rome in 1938, said that there are several categories of scientists in the world: those of second or third rank who do their best but never get very far, then there’s the first rank – those who make important discoveries fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these. AM: Wow. CO: Yeah. But Majorana wasn’t interested in fame and fortune. He’d only published nine papers in his lifetime and, by all accounts, he had shied away from public life. AM: So…why are we talking about him? CO: He was apparently close to a breakthrough, something he had uncovered while researching a theory of his that never really caught on. Something related to gravitational waves and neutrino masses. AM: Those old chestnuts. CO: Right. Well, Majorana thought he could prove that math exerted a small shielding effect on gravitational waves. AM: Ok well, I only have a limited understanding of physics but, I don’t believe that’s something that’s been proven. CO: You’re correct. It’s unlikely. However, like I mentioned, Majorana had been expanding his…reach. Performing other…experiments. Some directly related, others more…tenuously connected. AM: What do you mean? CO: Well, it turns out he was trying to find a way to measure the soul. AM: Ok…that sounds certainly less likely than his gravitational wave stuff. CO: Certainly does. However, there is evidence to suggest he’d begun conducting a series of test on human subjects. AM: Really? CO: Yeah. AM: What kind of tests? CO: Ah, I’m not sure but, allegedly at the time of his disappearance in 1938, he’d been doing some kind of research with a number of…devices. AM: Hm. What kind of devices? CO: Not sure. But there were reportedly gifted to him by a friend. AM: That’s pretty interesting for sure, but how does any of this connect to the Leap Year Society. CO: Well, because those devices were gifted to Ettore Majorana by a woman named Millicent Harper. -voiceover- AM: A brief additional bit of information on the mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana. Majorana disappeared during a trip by boat from Palermo to Naples on March 25, 1938. There were numerous investigations into his disappearance, however, his fate remains a mystery…his body never found. Adding to the strangeness surrounding Majorana’s vanishing is the fact that he’d withdrawn all his money from the bank prior to his trip and, on the very day of his disappearance, he sent the following note to the Director of the Physics Institute in Naples. AM: “Dear Carrelli, I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn’t a bit of selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. For this as well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the sincere friendship and the sympathy you gave me over the past months. I ask you to remember me to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 pm tonight, possibly later too. E. Majorana.” AM: So, there appeared to be a connection between Ettore Majorana, a scientist who went missing under very mysterious circumstances, and Millicent Harper. But what does all of this have to do with our other disappearing scientist Waylon Taylor? I asked Colin to explain. CO: Right. So, Waylon Taylor was a disciple of sorts to Ettore Majorana. He believed that Majorana’s greatest contribution was yet to come. And it was a “foul conspiracy” – his words – that had taken or murdered Ettore Majorana right before he was about to reveal the results of his more, um, out there experiments. AM: What experiments? The search for the soul? CO: It’s unclear, but that’s the most likely explanation. AM: And where are you getting all this Waylon Taylor-Ettore Majorana information? CO: I can’t say. AM: What??? CO: (chuckles) Kidding. I’ll send you all the links and scanned documents. AM: Thanks. CO: No worries. (adjusts phone) AM: So, the two scientists are connected how exactly? CO: Well, a lot of that has to do with the similarities between what the two men were looking into at the time of their disappearances and circumstances surrounding those disappearances. AM: Ok. CO: Oh, and there’s something else. Ettore Majorana wasn’t dead. AM: No? CO: No, they found him alive in 1959 and researching something very strange. AM: They found him? CO: Yeah, they did. -voiceover- AM: We’ll get back to my conversation with Colin about Ettore Majorana and Waylon Taylor very soon, I promise. But first, my friend and producer Mitch called me into the studio. She told me that she has some news. -cut to conversation between Amanda and Mitch- AM: What is it? MS: I’m not sure, but…I think it’s pretty interesting. AM: Where did you get this stuff? MS: About three months ago, I posted a query on a deep web forum dedicated to secret societies. AM: Ok. MS: A few days ago, I received a response in the form of a question. AM: What question? MS: Three letters…L, Y, S and a question mark. AM: So, you responded right away with? MS: With a resounding yes, any information would be greatly appreciated. AM: And? MS: And I received this response about 15 minutes ago. -voiceover- AM: At this point, Mitch showed me a message she’d received on her phone. It was a series of numbers. We’d both seen enough longitude and latitude measurement to recognize location coordinates when we saw them. We plugged the numbers into Google Earth and discovered a location that was about 20 minutes from our studio. -cut to Amanda and Mitch at the location- AM: It should be just up around the next corner. MS: (laughs) This is CRAZY. AM: It’s kind of cool actually. Especially if there’s something waiting for us at these coordinates. -voiceover- AM: I should interject here. Although Mitch had no idea how whoever had contacted her had found her telephone number, we didn’t feel like we were in danger. When we set out to investigate those coordinates, it was the middle of the day. There were a lot of people around. At no point did either of us feel unsafe. -cut back to Amanda and Mitch at the location- MS: Ok, uh, it should be right around this intersection. AM: Um…Mitch? I think this might be what we’re looking for. MS: Oh my God! -voiceover- AM: We were looking at a small poster that had been glued onto a pole, just above the button you’d press to cross the street. The poster featured an old style photograph of a symbol: a circle with the letters LYS with a couple of extra lines on the Y, almost like calipers. Beneath the symbol were another series of numbers. AM: While digging into what had happened to Ettore Majorana way back in 1938, Colin had received an anonymous message. Something directly related to Majorana. Something very interesting. -cut back to call with Colin- CO: Back in 2015, the Rome attorney’s office released an official statement indicating that Majorana had been alive between 1955 and 1959 and had been living in Valencia, Venezuela. They declared that Majorana’s disappearance had been most likely a personal choice. The case was officially closed. AM: How did they come to that conclusion? CO: That’s a good question. Well, the RIS – which is the Italian scientific investigation department – analyzed a photograph of a man taken in Argentina in 1955. They found ten points of similarity with Majorana. AM: Ok, so he was definitely alive. CO: It appears so. But there’s more. AM: There is? CO: Yeah. Someone sent me another photo of Majorana, taken at around the same time. One that was never published. And I think you’re gonna find it quite interesting. -voiceover- AM: So, Colin sent me that picture, a photo he’d gotten from somebody who claimed it came from the archives of the RIS, the Italian scientific investigation department. It was a picture of a man sitting on a bench in what appeared to be a train station. In front of him, clearly visible, it’s a suitcase. And stamped there on the front of that suitcase was the symbol. The exact same symbol that had been printed on the small poster we discovered on that pole. -outro begins- AM: You’ve been listening to the Leap Year Society. I’m Amanda Morrison. Thank you for listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Remember, you can join the investigation and find all of the links, images, and videos mentioned in our podcast on our website, lyspodcast.com. The Leap Year Society podcast is produced by Michelle Sorrenson and me, Amanda Morrison. Researched by Colin Orry. Special thanks to Terry Miles at Minnow Beats Whale Productions. If you like the Leap Year Society, show us by visiting the lyspodcast.com and please make sure to rate and review the show. Certain scenes have been reenacted to protect the identities of those involved. Thank you for listening to the Leap Year Society. -music- AM: Tanis is a docudrama podcast about an ancient and mysterious myth, perhaps the last genuine mystery of the information age. Tanis is what happens when the lines of science and fiction start to blur. So, download the podcast the Guardian calls ‘compelling and wildly addictive’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen. Tanis is like a cross between Serial, Lost and an Andrei Tarkovsky film. Tanis…it’s television for your ears. Notes Kubaba was indeed a ruler of the city-state of Kish in Mesopotamia. She is the only queen on the Sumerian List of Kings and one of very few women to have ever ruled in their own right in Iraqi history. Not only is Ettore Majorana an actual mathematician, but his mysterious disappearance, the letter sent to Carrelli, the RIS’s closing of the case in 2015 and the photograph having a ten point match are also authentic. The Grand Orange Lodge is an arm of the Orange Order, a society founded in 1795 and still active today. The numbers at the bottom of the poster, while only briefly mentioned here, are a code in base 8. The decryption of this code is discussed in Episode 4.